Sepsis is a severe disease for example in the form of a malady of the immune system caused by an infection or other traumas.
If the patient suffering from sepsis is not treated or if the therapy is not optimal the patient may die.
Sepsis is a complicated disease involving the reactions of several components of the immune system to an infection. These reactions are difficult to monitor because they involve many cell types all communicating with each other via chemical messengers that are not routinely measured in the clinic and even if they were, these measurements would be difficult to interpret because the dynamics of these responses are so complex and vary widely among patients. The complexity of sepsis may be seen by the facts that sepsis is the tenth leading cause of death in the USA and the leading cause of death in non-cardiac intensive care units in spite of several decades of research.
Today therapies of sepsis are based on the clinicians experience and skills, however, due to the complexity of sepsis even experienced clinicians may not be able to execute the optimal therapy, or the clinician may even execute a therapy leading to a deteriorated situation for the patient.
Some of the challenges faced by the clinicians when a sepsis patient needs treatment are caused by the large number of unknown biological and physiological factors affecting the development of the disease as well as the dynamic and often rapid changing behaviour of the disease.
Accordingly, it may be seen as a problem to create a system capable of assisting the clinician in executing a suitable therapy for patients suffering from diseases such as sepsis.
US 2003/0097220 discloses a decision support system for recommending an optimal treatment protocol for a specific individual. The system comprises generally a system model, a plurality of treatment protocols, a system model modifier, wherein said system model is modified by the system model modifier based on parameters specific to the individual; and a selector to select an optimal treatment protocol from said plurality of treatment protocols based on the modified system model.
The method disclosed in US 2003/0097220 is related to treating cancer and, therefore, is not capable of dealing with diseases having a highly dynamic nature of development that change rapidly in short time scales (e.g. hours) and, consequently, is not suitable for assisting a clinician in treating sepsis.